‘It’s like an episode of The Love Boat’

Patton Oswalt on filming Blade Trinity in Vancouver

This past week, AV Club posted an interview with Patton Oswalt about some of his various roles. The exceptionally long interview’s notable for two things—the way the stand-up comic/actor justifies his paycheck for Two and a Half Men, and what he has to say about Vancouver, where he filmed Blade: Trinity(2004). To wit:

“…it was a very troubled production. Wesley [Snipes] was just fucking crazy in a hilarious way. He wouldn’t come out of his trailer, and he would smoke weed all day. Which is fine with me, because I had all these DVDs that I wanted to catch up on. We were in Vancouver, and it was always raining. I kept the door to my trailer open to smell the evening rain while I was watching a movie…

“And he tried to strangle the director, David Goyer. So later that night, Ron Perlman was in the city. Everyone who makes movies in Vancouver stays in the same hotel [probably the Sutton Place Hotel-SC]. It’s like an episode of The Love Boat. Every time the elevator stops, you’ve got a different celebrity getting on. Like, [announcer’s voice] ‘Hey, now we’ve got Danny Glover!’ So we went out that night to some strip club [most likely Brandi’s-SC], and we were all drinking. And there were a bunch of bikers there, so David says to them, ‘I’ll pay for all your drinks if you show up to set tomorrow and pretend to be my security.’ Wesley freaked out and went back to his trailer. [Laughs.] And the next day, Wesley sat down with David and was like, ‘I think you need to quit. You’re detrimental to this movie.’ And David was like, ‘Why don’t you quit? We’ve got all your close-ups, and we could shoot the rest with your stand-in.’ And that freaked Wesley out so much that, for the rest of the production, he would only communicate with the director through Post-it notes. And he would sign each Post-it note ‘From Blade.’ [Laughs]”